Quick Culture Hit...

...or, as I described it to a colleague as I was leaving my office at lunch, "I've decided that I have to start going out and taking a half hour at lunchtime to get some nuggets of culture." Which is a strange way to phrase a desire to pack a little more culture into my everyday life. Hard as I try to think of nuggets of culture as burnished gold pebbles, my mind's eye inevitably settles on....Chicken McNuggets. Chicken McNuggets that somehow have the Mona Lisa's image imprinted on them, or Munch's "The Scream," or Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Or, ugh, Monet's "Water Lilies." It's kind of revolting. And an art project, I guess.

But I did get my...dollop...of culture today. (Much better. Makes me think of whipped cream.) Since my employer is a corporate member of the MOMA I get in free, so I took a half hour to go into the Contemporary Galleries. Note to people whose companies are corporate members--the MOMA is curbing corporate member benefits. Instead of being allowed to bring in four people, now you can bring in two (I usually don't go to musums in packs of five, anyway) and there's some other restriction with the passes to films, which I wasn't even aware we got a discount on. If anyone's interested in the changed terms, leave a post and I'll send the info. Or if you go get a ticket as a corporate member, they'll give you a slip of paper that lays it out.

ANYWAY, to get to the Contemporary Galleries you have to go up the stairs and through some Cy Twombly paintings, and past an enormous, bronze pencil-sculpture-thing. I perhaps need to gain a better appreciation for Cy Twombly. His "Leda and the Swan"? (pictured) And "The Italians"? Are they really great art? They kind of look like...bad art. Like, "I'm trying too hard to be cryptic" art, so I'm going to squiggle here, scratch there, slop a glop of ugly-colored paint here, and then I'm going to write random words on a canvas--yeah, in pencil!--and then...I'm a genius! Now decipher me! Okay, I'm showing a philistine side and it may just've been my mood on the first day back at work since Dec. 23. But it's an honest philistine side, if that counts for anything. (P.S. After writing that I read on wikipedia.org that Twombly "served in the army as a cryptologist, which influenced his work." Who knew?)

So, a discovery. The show in the Contemporary Galleries is "Out of Time/A Contemplation," and while I could do without the three basketballs half covered with water in a fishtank, by Jeff Koons, there were two items in the second room that I thought were very cool and/or interesting.

No. 1 interesting thing: Janine Antoni's "Butterfly Kisses 1996-99." Her medium: Cover Girl mascara on paper. Uh huh. The tag tells the tale: "The artist applied many coats of Cover Girl Thick Lash mascara to her eyelashes and then fluttered them against the paper. She averaged 60 winks per day and completed the drawing after approximately 2,124 winks, and over many months."

It's pretty cool-looking. (And any woman knows that applying mascara can be messy--I wish she'd taken pictures of herself after 40 winks.) It reminded me of Florentine swirly paper sold at Il Papiro, but in black and cream as opposed to greens and blues. The only other way I can think of to describe the effect of her eye-fluttering on paper was that it looks like a pelt, like fur--as if a polar bear rolled around in slush or had been covered with a light coating of soot.

You can read some good PBS articles on her. It's worth checking out--she does some very out-there stuff, as in Gnaw (2002), which involved 600 pounds of chocolate gnawed by her, 600 pounds of lard gnawed by her, a display with 130 lipsticks made with pigments and beeswax, and chewed by her...you get the idea. She also directed a 4-minute film inspired by the Shaker tradition of ecstatic dancing. The MOMA also has a learning page on her. And here's "Lick and Lather," self-portraits in soap and chocolate, that, of course, she either licked or lathered with.









The other piece I liked, just for its out-there-ness, was by a Swiss artist born in 1962, Pipiliotti Rist (yes, a nickname--you know, Pippi Longstocking; she was born Elisabeth Charlotte). It's called "Ever is Over All," whatever that means, and was executed in 1997. Her website is here. "Ever is Over All" is a video project and it involves two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. One focuses on lush flowers in a field, and the other focuses on this attractive, ethereal-looking, blissed-out woman, dressed in a flowing baby blue chiffon dress and red shoes, as she strolls down a sidewalk.

All seems normal, except that she is carrying a large metal stalk with a red/yellow/orange flower on top similar to the real flowers you see in the other projection. She's meandering along happily on a sidewalk, and then she cheerfully and gracefully slams the stalk into the window of a parked car, which only seems to increase her bliss. She goes on to do it again and again, never losing her poise. It is bizarre. A red-lipsticked, hatted policewoman walks behind her for a bit, not seeming to think anything is amiss, and smiles at her in passing after she smashes her third or so car window. The tag summed it up well as a "whimsical and anarchistic scene."

So it was two cultural nuggets. And you know what? I really enjoyed them.